Mentoring and networking

Just a quick update as I'm on the move a lot the next few weeks.

Today I'm having the first meeting of several with ACEVO members who are interested in one of our new mentoring programmes.
The context here goes back about 9 months - I met with John Stokoe, Vice President for National Government at BT first with Seb Elsworth (ACEVO director of strategy and author of fab blogsworth - http://sebelsworth.blogspot.com)
among other things, we discussed the work ACEVO do on developing leadership by facilitating cross-sector partnerships. Quite honestly, we had tried before but the resources hadn't been there to do the project justice. We had produced a great publication with great case study material etc. but there had been little follow up.
Here was a great opportunity to re-ignite the process! The next meeting was with Erin McFeely, my colleague in our Leeds office who has done a great deal of work around developing our leadership work. We floated the idea of partnership creation to John, who said the BT talent pool could be a great access point. Also, many of this group want to experience the third sector- seemed almost too good.
So Erin and I took these strands of ideas away and knocked them into shape and created a full proposal for John. It was at this stage that julia Richards got involved to create the matching part of the programme - she has created these on the past for large corporations and has had huge success doing so.

So skip ahead through the months and here we are - approval to run a large scale, nationwide mentoring programme between third sector CEOs and top BT execs. And I have a meeting with Matthew Thompson of the LCRN to discuss it later today.
It's easy to forget how much various people put into this project; I'm very lucky to be part of such a great team.

This evening, myself and my colleague Jazzmin (who works on all things sustainable business with me) are going to the spring conference of the pennies foundation- a great organisation who are getting into a very interesting area - using technology to generate point of sale charity donations. I met the CEO a few months back and am really looking forward to seeing how they have progressed. Hopefully there are some connections I might make to ACEVO's corporate partners who may be in a position to help. It will also present a great opportunity to meet some more potential corporates and, more importantly, spread the word about our sustainable business forum!